shape, a momentum—and then it had stopped. Jude had stopped it.
“I liked it. It was great and everything.” He left out the part about the breast milk. “I guess I just got a little weirded out. I’m supposed to be straight edge.”
“True.”
“And she’s pregnant. With Teddy’s kid.”
His father placed his soda on the table beside them. “It’s a little weird,” he said, not unkindly. “But soon she won’t be pregnant.”
Jude leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and sank his forehead in his hands. Away from Eliza, in the noise of the waiting room, her pregnancy now seemed a small matter to overcome, a curable condition. It would be as if the baby—and Teddy—had never been born. It was the worst possible outcome. They had let Teddy down. They had held this miracle in their hands, nurtured it, fought for it, and then, together, they’d dropped it.
He felt it fall: a baby over a ledge. He felt it fall many, many stories, never landing, just diving through thin air.
But what then to do with this immense relief, this joy rolling out like a carpet before him, the surprise gift of their youth returned to their hands?
He wondered if his own birth mother, unburdened by him, went on to live her life and kiss boys.
“Will they let you outside in that getup?” Les stood up, stretched, and crushed his soda can. “I need a smoke.”
First Avenue was sleepy with Sunday-evening traffic. A school of taxis swam together from light to light. Cigarette butts littered the sidewalk around Jude’s bare feet, and the air was warm with restaurant grease and petrol, the uriney stink of trash. Still, it felt good to be outside. The air wasn’t as pure as Vermont air, but it was just as rich, just as distinctively laced. He inhaled.
“You know what I think, St. Jude?” Les lit his cigarette. “I think it’s time we were roommates again. I’ve missed New York. Now that Lady Di isn’t a crazy woman anymore, I’m going to talk to Davis about getting my old place back. What do you say?”
“I don’t know,” Jude said. “I guess I’d have to think about it.”
“Don’t worry about your mother,” Les said. “Now that she’s got a man friend, she’s not so alone. Isn’t this groovy, all this love in the air? Your mom found someone, you found someone. Now I just have to—”
“A man friend? Wait, who did she find?”
“She didn’t tell you?” Les exhaled out of the corner of his mouth. “She’s got a man friend. A P.I., of all things.”
“A P.I.?” Jude could only picture Tom Selleck.
“Di hired some New York investigator to track you guys down. He found me first. I tried to keep him off your trail, but eventually he caught up with your mom. By that time, though, you guys were on the move again. He kept visiting your mom to buy pipes and fell for her. Ended up helping her scatter some bread crumbs to Chicago to keep Di busy.”
Jude’s head was spinning. “Wait. You and Mom both tried to keep us from Di?”
“And now he wants to move to Vermont, live the country life. Romantic, huh?”
“Mom has a man friend? Who’s a private investigator?”
So he hadn’t imagined the voice in the background. His mom hadn’t dated anyone since his dad.
“Any asshole can be a P.I.” Les told Jude about his friend’s brother who took a class at John Jay, had some business cards printed up, and now charged top dollar to take pictures of husbands fucking around on their wives. Les tapped his cigarette at his side. The bitterness edged his voice again. “But she deserves to be happy. She’s a special lady, your mom.”
“What about Di?”
Les shook his head. The suntan on his face gave him a ragged, inflamed look. His fingers released his cigarette; it dropped to the ground. “I’m done with pining for old flames. She wouldn’t take me back, anyway.”
Which old flames his father was referring to he didn’t know. Surely there were many in the vast bank of his past, before his mother, during, after. Husbands fucked around on their wives, and private investigators took pictures of them. People fucked, fucked up; they married, had babies, divorced. His father was as guilty as any of them, and for years Jude had despised him for it. Now, watching his tattered Birkenstock stamp out the cigarette on the sidewalk, it occurred to Jude that his father, for reasons of his own, might be as heartbroken